I’ve been looking at the latest GoPro action cam as a solution to use with Mapillary.
Does anybody have any experience with them? If yes, please tell me all about GPS and clock accuracy, because after looking at other threads and asking in our national OSM group, those are my main concerns. Also, I hope uploading the sequence is not that complicated. I’m mainly looking at capturing very specific sequences to aid with mapping, and taking advantage of the ruggedness of this camera. Hope someone can help me out

I’ve used a GoPro 6 on my front glass, a GoPro 3 on my back glass, and sometimes a Fusion out through the moon roof.

My setup was to set the cameras to take one photo per second and just keep taking them, later doing a sweep to delete unnecessary photos when the car is on a red light for example.

Setting up with half a second was problematic. The camera exif looks correct (sub-second timestamps), but something somewhere goes wrong, and the sequence typically gets blocks where the photos are ordered like 1 3 2 5 4 7 6. One photo per second is more than enough.

The GoPro 6 has an amazing GPS, sometimes even better than the iPhone, as it’s using the suction cup on the glass, and always with GPS view.

For the GoPro 3, I just dump a GPX of all photos from the GP6, and then figure out some photo that is in common between the two cameras (e.g. the exact frame where the car starts moving), and then apply the GPX data for the coordinates and the timestamp into the GP3 photos.

With the Fusion I had some cases where it overheated, being outside the car, summer time in Portugal, and whilst it kept on capturing photos, the GPS information was gone. So I used the same trick as above, with the GP6 on the front glass, and if the Fusion goes crazy, I use the coordinates from the GP6 to fix the Fusion.

However, it’s been months since I had time to capture more stuff, so a lot may have changed both on the GP firmware, and in particular on the Mapillary tools.

keep in mind you’ll have to interpolate pictures from GP7 as it has no internal compass.
Otherwise, the versatility of external-mount accessories, strong suction cups, ability to shoot while charging and the (supposed) integration with the Mapillary app make it a good choice (if you can get it cheap)

For the GoPro 3, I just dump a GPX of all photos from the GP6, and then figure out some photo that is in common between the two cameras (e.g. the exact frame where the car starts moving), and then apply the GPX data for the coordinates and the timestamp into the GP3 photos.

Hey davipt. Can you share how you do that? Using python scripts or there is an easier way?

This comparison does not show that the Hero 7 Silver cannot be controlled by the smart remote. I surely need that in the car. The capacity of the battery of the remote is limited. But it works while charging ?. But then you probably have to lengthen the USB cable.

I take many overlapping pictures. Are the angles not corrected by Mapillary after some time ?

I seem to remember reading somewhere that the smart controller does NOT work to start stop time-lapse. Cant remember if it was in the GoPro 7 manual or the controller manual. I will see if I can find it.

Not true. I have been doing that for one week now.
And there is even a beep on the camera when it starts and several beeps when you tell it to stop. In my settings, first it counts the pictures and after a time only a led flashes.
Today I had to reset the camera because the pairing did not work any more.
Do not forget that the Hero 7 Silver does not work at all with the smart remote.

Just confirmed with GoPro - cant control multiple cameras with time lapse photos BUT you can with timelapse video supposedly. I had to ask three times to get this answer - twice they said is was possible until I pointed out their notes in the smart controller manual

@4004 I would certainly like it confirmed with someone that has multiple GoPro’s running time-lapse PHOTOS, as I have had so many differing answers from GoPro. It was also my desire to run multiple gopros with a single smart controller. If I take time lapse VIDEO I will need to use scripting to upload videos rather than the desktop uploader

That is all very well to match the timestamps, but what timestamps do you use? Can you really find the exact time? A difference of one second is 13.8 metres at 50 kph.

I have been trying to correct my Samsung phone jpegs with a better track from a Garmin 78s that has an external aerial.
The Garmin track is clearly better, being always at least in the lane, whereas the lat/long from the photos strays off the road by up to 20 metres.

I was aiming for +/- 2 metres that the SBAS correction provides…
Have you compared the filename timestamp with the EXIF timestamp? That was a surprise!
The times are usually within +/-2 seconds, but sometimes there is a difference of 5 seconds. If I use the time to correct the lat/long it might be in the road, but around the corner.

Note that the gpx points are not the same as the image locations, they are different frequencies and are smoothed and generalised differently. The only way to get an interpolated position is to use linear referencing. I use decimal seconds since the epoch. But it depends on sub-second precision of the timing.

Hi there, So, I have my new Hero 7 Black. I love the quality and features... but the camera is severely misbehaving for no known reason. In many ways, these issues happen so often, they render the camera unusable. I have an advanced backround...

Hmm very interesting. I have only had a couple of crashes and it occurred when a 128GB SD card was getting close to capacity. It seems the GoPro doesn’t like it when you have more than XXX number of images on the card.

Your card looks compatible so I suspect the number of photos is more of an issue. It’s probably trying to calculate how much space you have left and gets confused due to the number of files. Just a guess though.